Regulars at The Head of Steam on Huddersfield station can expect a change from their usual viewing this week as televised sport in the pub gives way to a series of harrowing films about domestic violence.

Seven short films, called Lives, by Yorkshire artist Beverley Addy will be played in pubs, hairdressers, shops and other public places across the town in a launch coinciding with International Women's Day on 8 March.

Addy says the project was born out of her own experience of an abusive relationship and a desire to "hold a mirror up to society" and get people talking about an issue that is still taboo.

For the films she ran a series of workshops with women who had used domestic violence services and asked them: "What sights and sounds make your hair stand on end?"

"They said 'hot things', so in one of the abstract films I use a pulsing electric cooker ring and an iron. And I weave in other images that kept cropping up, like falling down stairs and the sound of doors slamming," explains Addy.

There are three text-only films using animated words, and two narratives, one based on a woman's description of how she rode her bike along a canal towpath to try to get away from the horrible thoughts in her head.

Just one of the Arts Council-funded films features the victim herself: a woman who describes how, when she was pregnant, her partner pushed her down the stairs and she miscarried.

Addy says: "Sometimes the emotional abuse was as damaging as the violence. At the mundane end it's men saying they don't like what you're wearing. But that's not about the clothes, it's about pulling the rug from under you and controlling you.

"It's hard for people to talk about all this. The women described how, slowly slowly, their confidence was ground down and they felt smaller and smaller."

At the film's preview at the Lawrence Batley theatre in Huddersfield last week one woman wrote in the comments' book: "It reminded me of my life and my childhood." Another noted: "That film with the doors slamming – I was back there."

Addy says: "I apologise to anybody who is upset because they've been through it. Material like this is not often seen by the general public, but art should not exist in a bubble.

"It's not a public information film, but maybe it might make a man in a pub reflect on his behaviour. Or a woman in a hairdresser watching while she waits for her colour to take might think, 'Oh my God, I don't want to be like that.'

"If it saves someone wasting five or 10 years of their life being somebody they really don't want to be, that would be great."